Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma

Giuliano Giacalone; Wenbin Zhao; Benjamin Bally; Shihang Shen; Thomas Duguet; Jean Paul Ebran; Serdar Elhatisari; Mikael Frosini; Timo A. Lähde; Dean Lee; Bing Nan Lu; Yuan Zhuo Ma; Ulf G. Meißner; Govert Nijs; Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler; Christopher Plumberg; Tomás R. Rodríguez; Robert Roth; Wilke Van Der Schee; Björn Schenke; Chun Shen; Vittorio Somà

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.082301

Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma

Giuliano Giacalone^*, Wenbin Zhao^*, Benjamin Bally, Shihang Shen, Thomas Duguet, Jean Paul Ebran, Serdar Elhatisari, Mikael Frosini, Timo A. Lähde, Dean Lee, Bing Nan Lu, Yuan Zhuo Ma, Ulf G. Meißner, Govert Nijs, Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler, Christopher Plumberg, Tomás R. Rodríguez, Robert Roth, Wilke Van Der Schee, Björn Schenke^*Chun Shen^*, Vittorio Somà

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

The System for Measuring Overlap with Gas (SMOG2) at the LHCb detector enables the study of fixed-target ion-ion collisions at relativistic energies (sNN∼100 GeV in the center of mass). With input from ab initio calculations of the structure of O16 and Ne20, we compute 3+1D hydrodynamic predictions for the anisotropic flow of Pb+Ne and Pb+O collisions to be tested with upcoming LHCb data. This will allow the detailed study of quark-gluon plasma formation as well as experimental tests of the predicted nuclear shapes. Elliptic flow (v2) in Pb+Ne collisions is greatly enhanced compared to the Pb+O baseline due to the shape of Ne20, which is deformed in a bowling-pin geometry. Owing to the large Pb208 radius, this effect is seen in a broad centrality range, a unique feature of this collision configuration. Larger elliptic flow further enhances the quadrangular flow (v4) of Pb+Ne collisions via nonlinear coupling, and impacts the sign of the kurtosis of the elliptic flow vector distribution (c2{4}). Exploiting the shape of Ne20 proves thus an ideal method to investigate the formation of quark-gluon plasma in fixed-target experiments at LHCb, and demonstrates the power of System for Measuring Overlap with Gas as a tool to image nuclear ground states.

Original language	English
Article number	082301
Number of pages	10
Journal	Physical Review Letters
Volume	134
Issue number	8
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.082301
Publication status	Published - 28 Feb 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 American Physical Society.

Funding

We thank the LHCb Collaboration for sharing with us the data shown in Fig. 1. We thank in particular Giacomo Graziani and the participants of the program + workshop "Exploring Nuclear Physics Across Energy Scales 2024" for useful discussions. We thank Mubarak Alqahtani for a careful reading of the manuscript. G. G. is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) -Project-ID 273811115-SFB 1225 ISOQUANT, and under Germany's Excellence Strategy EXC2181/1-390900948 (the Heidelberg STRUCTURES Excellence Cluster) . This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under DOE Contract No. DE-SC0012704 (B. P. S.) and Award No. DE-SC0021969 (C. S.) , and within the framework of the Saturated Glue (SURGE) Topical Theory Collaboration. C. S. acknowledges a DOE Office of Science Early Career Award. W. B. Z. is sup-ported by DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, by NSF under Grant No. OAC-2004571 within the X-SCAPE Collaboration, and within the framework of the SURGE Topical Theory Collaboration. This research was done using resources provided by the Open Science Grid (OSG) [93,94] , which is supported by the National Science Foundation Award No. 2030508. This work is supported in part by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC AdG EXOTIC, Grant agreement No. 101018170) , by DFG and NSFC through funds provided to the Sino-German CRC 110 "Symmetries and the Emergence of Structure in QCD" (NSFC Grant No. 11621131001, DFG Grant No. TRR110) . The work of U. G. M. was supported in part by the CAS President's International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) (Grant No. 2018DM0034) . R. R. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) -Projektnummer 279384907-SFB 1245. T. R. R. is supported by the Spanish MCIU (PID2021-127890NB-I00) . The PGCM calculations were performed using HPC resources from GENCI-TGCC (Contract No. A0130513012 and No. A0150513012) and CCRT (TOPAZE supercomputer) . The NLEFT code development and production calculations utilized the following compu-tational resources: the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. [102] for computing time on the GCS Supercomputer JUWELS at Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and special GPU time allocated on JURECA-DC; the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility through the INCITE award "Ab-initio nuclear structure and nuclear reactions"; and the TUBITAK ULAKBIM High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TRUBA resources) . J. N. H. acknowledges financial support from the US-DOE Nuclear Science Grant No. DE-SC0023861 and within the framework of the Saturated Glue (SURGE) Topical Theory. B. N. Lu is supported by the NSAF No.U2330401 and National Natural Science Foundation of China with Grant No. 12275259. D. L. is supported by U.S. Department of Energy Grants No. DE-SC0024586, No. DE-SC0023658, No. DE-SC0013365, No. DE-SC0023175.r Foundation) -Projektnummer 279384907-SFB 1245. T. R. R. is supported by the Spanish MCIU (PID2021-127890NB-I00) . The PGCM calculations were performed using HPC resources from GENCI-TGCC (Contract No. A0130513012 and No. A0150513012) and CCRT (TOPAZE supercomputer) . The NLEFT code development and production calculations utilized the following compu-tational resources: the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. [102] for computing time on the GCS Supercomputer JUWELS at Julich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and special GPU time allocated on JURECA-DC; the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility through the INCITE award "Ab-initio nuclear structure and nuclear reactions"; and the TUBITAK ULAKBIM High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TRUBA resources) . J. N. H. acknowl-edges financial support from the US-DOE Nuclear Science Grant No. DE-SC0023861 and within the framework of the Saturated Glue (SURGE) Topical Theory. B. N. Lu is supported by the NSAF No.U2330401 and National Natural Science Foundation of China with Grant No. 12275259. D. L. is supported by U.S. Department of Energy Grants No. DE-SC0024586, No. DE-SC0023658, No. DE-SC0013365, No. DE-SC0023175.

Funders	Funder number
GENCI-TGCC	279384907-SFB 1245, PID2021-127890NB-I00
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility through the INCITE award "Ab-initio nuclear structure and nuclear reactions"	A0130513012, A0150513012
US-DOE Nuclear Science	DE-SC0023861
Saturated Glue (SURGE) Topical Theory
NSAF
National Natural Science Foundation of China	12275259
U.S. Department of Energy
Not added	DE-SC0024586
Not added	DE-SC0023658
Not added	DE-SC0013365
Not added	DE-SC0023175

Keywords

Body perturbation-theory
Heavy-ion collisions
Pb collisions
Collectivity
Dependence
Pp

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PhysRevLett.134.082301Final published version, 1.08 MB

Cite this

Giacalone, G., Zhao, W., Bally, B., Shen, S., Duguet, T., Ebran, J. P., Elhatisari, S., Frosini, M., Lähde, T. A., Lee, D., Lu, B. N., Ma, Y. Z., Meißner, U. G., Nijs, G., Noronha-Hostler, J., Plumberg, C., Rodríguez, T. R., Roth, R., Van Der Schee, W., ... Somà, V. (2025). Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma. Physical Review Letters, 134(8), Article 082301. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.082301

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title = "Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma",

abstract = "The System for Measuring Overlap with Gas (SMOG2) at the LHCb detector enables the study of fixed-target ion-ion collisions at relativistic energies (sNN∼100 GeV in the center of mass). With input from ab initio calculations of the structure of O16 and Ne20, we compute 3+1D hydrodynamic predictions for the anisotropic flow of Pb+Ne and Pb+O collisions to be tested with upcoming LHCb data. This will allow the detailed study of quark-gluon plasma formation as well as experimental tests of the predicted nuclear shapes. Elliptic flow (v2) in Pb+Ne collisions is greatly enhanced compared to the Pb+O baseline due to the shape of Ne20, which is deformed in a bowling-pin geometry. Owing to the large Pb208 radius, this effect is seen in a broad centrality range, a unique feature of this collision configuration. Larger elliptic flow further enhances the quadrangular flow (v4) of Pb+Ne collisions via nonlinear coupling, and impacts the sign of the kurtosis of the elliptic flow vector distribution (c2\{4\}). Exploiting the shape of Ne20 proves thus an ideal method to investigate the formation of quark-gluon plasma in fixed-target experiments at LHCb, and demonstrates the power of System for Measuring Overlap with Gas as a tool to image nuclear ground states.",

keywords = "Body perturbation-theory, Heavy-ion collisions, Pb collisions, Collectivity, Dependence, Pp",

author = "Giuliano Giacalone and Wenbin Zhao and Benjamin Bally and Shihang Shen and Thomas Duguet and Ebran, \{Jean Paul\} and Serdar Elhatisari and Mikael Frosini and L{\"a}hde, \{Timo A.\} and Dean Lee and Lu, \{Bing Nan\} and Ma, \{Yuan Zhuo\} and Mei{\ss}ner, \{Ulf G.\} and Govert Nijs and Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler and Christopher Plumberg and Rodr{\'i}guez, \{Tom{\'a}s R.\} and Robert Roth and \{Van Der Schee\}, Wilke and Bj{\"o}rn Schenke and Chun Shen and Vittorio Som{\`a}",

note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2025 American Physical Society.",

year = "2025",

month = feb,

day = "28",

doi = "10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.082301",

language = "English",

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Giacalone, G, Zhao, W, Bally, B, Shen, S, Duguet, T, Ebran, JP, Elhatisari, S, Frosini, M, Lähde, TA, Lee, D, Lu, BN, Ma, YZ, Meißner, UG, Nijs, G, Noronha-Hostler, J, Plumberg, C, Rodríguez, TR, Roth, R, Van Der Schee, W, Schenke, B, Shen, C & Somà, V 2025, 'Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma', Physical Review Letters, vol. 134, no. 8, 082301. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.082301

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T1 - Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma

AU - Giacalone, Giuliano

AU - Zhao, Wenbin

AU - Bally, Benjamin

AU - Shen, Shihang

AU - Duguet, Thomas

AU - Ebran, Jean Paul

AU - Elhatisari, Serdar

AU - Frosini, Mikael

AU - Lähde, Timo A.

AU - Lee, Dean

AU - Lu, Bing Nan

AU - Ma, Yuan Zhuo

AU - Meißner, Ulf G.

AU - Nijs, Govert

AU - Noronha-Hostler, Jacquelyn

AU - Plumberg, Christopher

AU - Rodríguez, Tomás R.

AU - Roth, Robert

AU - Van Der Schee, Wilke

AU - Schenke, Björn

AU - Shen, Chun

AU - Somà, Vittorio

PY - 2025/2/28

Y1 - 2025/2/28

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KW - Collectivity

KW - Dependence

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Anisotropic Flow in Fixed-Target Pb 208 + Ne 20 Collisions as a Probe of Quark-Gluon Plasma

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